By: Colin Lacy

TheSouthernSportsEdition.com news services

“The World’s Largest Cocktail Party”, is it the Georgia/Florida game or the Florida/Georgia game, one thing that everyone can agree on.

This game is one of, if not the single, greatest rivalry in college sports. The game between these two goes WAY back into the history books (how deep is a point of contention…. we’ll get to that), so let’s dive into what this game has been!

Where do we start? Well… it depends on who you ask. For the Georgia contingency, the first Georgia/Florida match-up took place in Macon, Georgia way back in 1904. Georgia ended up with the victory with a final score of 52-0.

The point of contention comes that the fact that the University of Florida Athletic Association doesn’t recognize that game because technically the team that Georgia defeated was officially named Florida Agricultural College.

The following year, the state legislature officially made the name change to what we know as University of Florida, but it took another year until 1906 that Florida officially says the football program began.

Either way, the first mutually agreed upon meeting took place in Jacksonville one mid-October afternoon in 1915, where Georgia handled Florida 37-0.

It took thirteen years for Florida to notch their first victory in the budding rivalry, defeating Georgia 26-6 in 1928.

Although the first mutually agreed game was in Jacksonville, it wasn’t until 1933 when the city became the official home for the game and has been the home for all but two (1994 and 1995) since that 1933 meeting.

We’ll fast forward in time to 1942 when everybody on the field in Red and Black was a “Damn Good Dawg” as Georgia obliterated Florida 75-0 in a game where Florida completed more passes to Georgia defenders (7) than their own receivers (6).

Jump ahead nearly 40 years when everybody tuning into the Georgia Bulldogs Radio Network heard the Legendary Larry Munson urged Lindsay Nelson to “Run Lindsay Run” 92 yards down the sideline to score to take the late lead over Florida. The Dawgs held on to the win thanks to a Mike Fisher interception after Munson broke his metal chair.

The mid-1990s saw the first on campus matchups (1994 in Gainesville, 1995 at Sanford Stadium in Athens) since the early 1930s. We saw Florida score ‘half a hundred’ on UGA at Sanford Stadium, which had never been done.

The two-year hiatus was a necessity because the then named Jacksonville Municipal Stadium was being built to accommodate the expansion franchise of the Jacksonville Jaguars.

One that will live in celebration or infamy (depending on the side of the fence you’re on) comes in 2007. What some call “the celebration game,” Georgia defeats the Gators 42-30.

This broke a streak where Florida won 15 of 17 meetings from 1990-2006.

It gets the name because on the first touchdown scored by the Dawgs’ Knowshon Moreno, the entire Georgia Bench floods on the field to celebrate as a team.

Head Coach Mark Richt admitted after the game that he had told the team before the game that “it was going to be a team celebration not an individual celebration.” He would go on to clarify, “I was expecting the 11 players on the field to be doing the celebrating, not for the bench to clear as it did.”

Like many “rivalries” have evolved, now there is a trophy to play for in the Georgia/Florida border war.

In 2009, the rivalry winner began taking home the Okefenokee Oar. The Gators would win the inaugural Oar with a 41-17 victory, taking home the 10-foot-long Oar, which had been carved from a 1,000-year-old cypress tree taken out of the Okefenokee Swamp which runs along the Georgia/Florida border.

In recent years there have been some classics. Whether it’s Aaron Murray leading the comeback in 2011, or the Dawgs shocking the #2 Gators in 2012, or maybe Florida causing five Dawg turnovers in 2015 for the 27-3 win.

Either way, the series has only gained momentum since it began in 1904 (or 1915…) the 2023 meeting sets up to be a classic with half the stadium in red, half in blue per usual.